First call of "Taps"

The first Taps

LIbrary of Congress photo

Union artilleryman Capt. John C. Tidball, second from left, who later became the longtime Commandant of the Artillery School at Fort Monroe, ordered the first performance of "Taps" as a funeral call at Berkeley Plantation in 1862. He's show here at Fair Oaks in June 1862, just weeks before the...

Union artilleryman Capt. John C. Tidball, second from left, who later became the longtime Commandant of the Artillery School at Fort Monroe, ordered the first performance of "Taps" as a funeral call at Berkeley Plantation in 1862. He's show here at Fair Oaks in June 1862, just weeks before the... (LIbrary of Congress photo)

It’s just 24 notes sounded on a bugle — and it lasts only 50 to 60 seconds all told.

Yet no piece of music is more widely known in America than the strains of “Taps” — or more deeply felt.

When the plaintive call was first heard 150 years ago in a Union army camp at Berkeley Plantation in Charles City County, however, only the sharpest old veterans might have recognized its roots in a passage of music taken from an outdated drill manual.

For thousands of others the distinctive melody emanating from the headquarters of Col. Daniel A. Butterfield’s 3rd Brigade sounded brand new — and as it wafted through the darkness it impressed the buglers of other units so much that they lined up early the following morning to get copies of the music.

“On a good clear night, the sound of a bugle will travel 1 or 2 miles away. So the other buglers heard it — and they picked it up right away,” says retired Air Force musician Jari Villanueva, head of the 150th anniversary observance scheduled at Berkeley Plantation this weekend.

“Pretty soon, everyone was playing ‘Taps’ to signal ‘Lights Out’ — even the Confederates. It transcended the politics of the war and the conflict between North and South.”

A 23-year veteran of the Air Force’s Washington, D.C.-based ceremonial band, Villanueva first performed “Taps” as a kid in the Boy Scouts.

He later played it thousands of times at Arlington National Cemetery for military funerals.

Early in his career, Villanueva recognized the unique qualities of a composition that — as he says — is not only melancholy but also reverent and peaceful.

“It doesn’t matter how many times you play it, performing ‘Taps’ is the most sacred duty a military bugler has,” he says.

“Every single performance has got to be like the first time you’ve done it because — in a lot of cases — it will be the first and most memorable time that a service member’s family has heard it.”

That deep sense of duty led the musician to conduct extensive historical research over the years, during which he discovered an all-but-forgotten story.

Despite winning official recognition from the army in 1874 — and becoming the regulation bugle call for military funeral ceremonies in 1891 — the composition reaches back much earlier to a Union officer who couldn’t read music.

Wounded at the June 27, 1862 Battle of Gaines Mill in an action for which he later received the Medal of Honor, Butterfield was among thousands of Army of the Potomac soldiers recuperating at Berkeley Plantation after the Seven Days Battles near Richmond.

Sometime in early July he asked bugler Oliver W. Norton of the 83rd Pennsylvania Infantry to substitute a reworked passage from an old 1835 call for the more formal French “Tattoo” normally played to signal “Lights Out.”

What resulted was an unusually short passage of just 24 notes that was evocative in ways that its predecessor wasn’t.

“It’s the only call in the military that’s slow throughout — and that gives it a very distinctive, very memorable quality,” Villanueva says.

“It’s easily recognized in just three notes.”

So compelling was the new tune that it not only spread quickly throughout the Army of the Potomac to signal “Lights Out” but also was played with memorable effect at the funeral of a fallen gunner from the 2nd U.S. Horse Artillery Brigade.

Ordered by Capt. John C. Tidball, who later became the longtime Commandant of the Artillery School at Fort Monroe, that landmark performance was commemorated at the fort’s Chapel of the Centurion in a stained-glass window.

When two corps were detached from the Army of the Potomac and sent west in the fall of 1863, the popular call began to spread to other Union forces.

Confederate buglers in the Army of Northern Virginia picked up “Taps” quickly, too, and an undocumented account describes it as having been played at Lt. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson’s May 1863 funeral.

Not until 35 years later, however, did the remarkable origin of this famous bugle call finally surface.

After reading a mistaken attribution by a music historian in the August 1898 edition of Century Magazine, Norton wrote in to tell his story, describing not only how Butterfield had revised an old call — “lengthening some notes and shortening others” — but also the enthusiastic reaction of other buglers.

Butterfield confirmed Norton’s account a few weeks later, recalling how “the call of Taps did not seem to be as smooth, melodious and musical as it should be” — and how he had altered the original, longer tune to “suit my ear.”

Just how that sounded may be imagined Saturday night when Villanueva presents the 150th anniversary performance on a bugle from the Civil War era.

Dozens of other buglers stationed around Berkeley’s grounds will then take up the call — echoing it just as they would have when the plantation was covered with the camps of scores of Union units.

“The older instrument has a darker, mellower sound — as opposed to the brighter, trumpetlike sound you hear today,” he says.

“And when we all get going, there’s going to be this wonderful sound of bugles hanging in the air for 5 or 10 minutes.”

Union infantry officer Daniel Adams Butterfield was recuperating from a battle wound at Berkeley Plantation in 1862 when he re-arranged the bugle call that would become known as "Taps." He later received the Medal of Honor for the action in which he was wounded and was promoted to Brigadier...

When Union sailors steamed into Hampton Roads with the captured CSS Florida in mid-November 1864, many of their countrymen on the East Coast embraced news of the unexpected trophy as if they had been delivered.

When Union sailors steamed into Hampton Roads with the captured CSS Florida in mid-November 1864, many of their countrymen on the East Coast embraced news of the unexpected trophy as if they had been delivered.